First of all, I love Construct Classic. In my very personal opinion, it beats the .... out of GameMaker. But anyway, regardless of opinions and whatnot I came to ask an important question before I truly start my project.

Is Construct Classic powerful as an engine?

By powerful, I mean, capable of displaying graphics like Braid or Shank. And featuring gameplay like those games. I have yet to see a game of such high caliber done with Construct.

Yet, I have seen games like Legend of Princess and Iconoclasts, that while graphically are inferior than the games listed before, gameplay-wise are amazing.

I've been trying XNA as well, and while I do have programming experience, it's impossible to deny everything takes 90000 hours more on coding than using an already polished engine. Why reinvent the wheel?

So before I choose between Construct or XNA (or other alternative) could someone please guide me about the limitations, downsides and other things to consider about making a Metroid-like platformer on Construct (with pretty 2D sprites)?masterlobo3602011-10-18 05:24:52

Construct Classic is as powerful as your machine can run + Direct X 9, so it's pretty powerful.

On my machine I tend to find XNA games are slower for me, but on newer hardware I guess you'll find XNA better, especially since it's multiplatform (Xbox, PC, Phone?).

If you want to make an awesome looking game, but aren't expecting it to run on a 10 year old machine/graphics card on max settings, then it's definitely do-able in both XNA and CC. So it's more a question of which you know best/will get the game done faster for you.

The main limitations of CC are: You must have the latest version of DirectX 9 installed, not just 10, but we haven't seen any issues having both installed.Then another is hardware acceleration, or rather the limitations with vram. While its great for multiple small instances, large textures simply eat it up, so a great deal of planning is in order.You can't just pile on megabytes and expect great results.I would say dealing with the quirks of the program is an issue, as I hear that repeated quite often, but the fact is you'd have stuff like that in any language, or engine.

Also, Construct is capable of making some pretty good looking games, as long as you spend the time making the graphics.

Like any language or game making utility, how good you make things is really limited by yourself. As long as you adhere to certain limitations (like newt has already mentioned), which is the same for any development platform anyway... then there is no reason why the next Metal Slug or whatever couldn't be made in Construct.

I believe that konjak, the author of Noitu Love and Noitu Love 2 had some good things to say about Construct HERE.

Both those games are what Construct's runtime was designed to do; high quality, HLSL shader enhanced graphics. The logic system is also extremely good and encourages a fast workflow.

The only downsides to Construct are minor runtime (specifically crashing when changing layout, which can be worked around) and edittime (crashes in the editor) instabilities . Also, your games can ONLY run on windows with classic.Davioware2011-10-18 16:47:44